BUSH: We believe America's going to be attacked again. There's all kinds of intelligence comin' in. And-- and-- one of the high value al Qaeda operatives was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the chief operating officer of al Qaeda... ordered the attack on 9/11. And they say, "He's got information." I said, "Find out what he knows." And so I said to our team, "Are the techniques legal?" He says, "Yes, they are." And I said, "Use 'em."
LAUER: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?
BUSH: Because the lawyer said it was legal. He said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I'm not a lawyer., but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do.
LAUER: You say it's legal. "And the lawyers told me."
BUSH: Yeah.
LAUER: Critics say that you got the Justice Department to give you the legal guidance and the legal memos that you wanted.
BUSH: Well--
LAUER: Tom Kean, who a former Republican co-chair of the 9/11 commission said they got legal opinions they wanted from their own people.
BUSH: He obviously doesn't know. I hope Mr. Kean reads the book. That's why I've written the book. He can, they can draw whatever conclusion they want. But I will tell you this. Using those techniques saved lives. My job is to protect America and I did.
FACT: Bush's claim is disputed by intelligence experts. As Media Matters has previously documented, intelligence officials have questioned the effectiveness of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques. The 2004 CIA Inspector General report concluded that "the effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained cannot be so easily measured." During his May 2009 Senate testimony, CIA interrogator Ali Soufan said such techniques "are ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result, harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda." A Washington Post article reported that Khalid Sheik Mohammed told the Red Cross, "During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information ... in order to make the ill-treatment stop."
CLAIM: Limbaugh misleadingly suggests Bush "inherited a terrorism crisis" and an "economic crisis" from President Clinton. During his November 9 on-air interview of Bush, Limbaugh, referring to Obama's references to the Bush administration, asked Bush, "Did you ever say you inherited a terrorism crisis from President Clinton, or an economic crisis?" From the transcript of the November 9 edition The Rush Limbaugh Show:
LIMBAUGH: I mean you are being blamed for the economy today. The current occupant constantly runs around saying I inherited this mess from you. Did you ever say you inherited a terrorism crisis from President Clinton or an economic crisis?
FACT: The Clinton administration stressed the importance of terrorism to Bush officials, and the recession began after Bush took office. Prior to the March 2004 commission hearings investigating the 9-11 attacks, senior Clinton administration officials maintained that they repeatedly warned their Bush counterparts in 2000 that Al Qaeda posed a serious threat to the U.S. Members of the commission concluded, according to The New York Times, that "a series of intelligence reports sent to President Bush in 2001 warned of an imminent, possibly catastrophic attack by Al Qaeda."
According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the recession began in March 2001, during Bush's presidency. NBER noted in November 2001:
The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee has determined that a peak in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in March 2001. A peak marks the end of an expansion and the beginning of a recession. The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began. The expansion lasted exactly 10 years, the longest in the NBER's chronology.
CLAIM: Limbaugh and Bush blame "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the whole subprime mortgage mess" on Democrats. In his interview with Bush, Limbaugh said that "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the whole subprime mortgage mess" were "a brainchild of the Democrats." Bush agreed, saying, "Yeah, that's right." From the transcript of the interview:
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